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New York Times: He Raised Three Marines. His Wife Is American. The U.S. Wants to Deport Him.

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After three decades in California, Narciso Barranco was arrested by agents while weeding outside an IHOP, stirring outrage and a fight to stop his deportation.

Before dawn on June 21, Narciso Barranco loaded his weed trimmer, lawn mower and leaf blower into his white F-150 pickup. He had three IHOP restaurants to landscape and then seven homes. His goal was to finish in time to cook dinner with his wife, Martha Hernandez.

It was a cool Saturday morning in Tustin, Calif., about 35 miles south of Los Angeles. After wrapping up work at the first IHOP, Mr. Barranco stopped to buy a wheel of fresh white cheese. He returned home and left it on the kitchen counter for Ms. Hernandez before driving seven minutes to an IHOP in Santa Ana.

He paid no attention to the Home Depot across the parking lot. Later, he would wish he had been more aware.

Migrants for decades have gathered outside the big-box stores, hoping a contractor or homeowner might offer a day’s work. But under President Trump’s immigration crackdown, Home Depot has become a prime target for federal agents under pressure to round up undocumented people like Mr. Barranco, who slipped across the border from Mexico more than 30 years ago.

Mr. Barranco, 48, was weeding between bushes when men in masks descended on him. He raised the head of his weed trimmer as he retreated. The authorities would say they believed he was attacking them; Mr. Barranco’s family said he was scared and just trying to move away, not to harm anyone. But in a tweet, the Department of Homeland Security would cite that moment to justify what happened next.

Mr. Barranco’s memory of his arrest is fragmented: the blinding sting of pepper spray; beefy federal agents taking him down and pinning him to the pavement; their relentless blows; the pain radiating from his left shoulder.

He didn’t dispute that he was in the country unlawfully. Still, he pleaded his case to the agents as they wrenched his arms behind his back.

“I have three boys in the Marines,” he recalled blurting out in English.

Surely that would count for something?

Mr. Trump’s mass deportation project is forcing many Americans to confront the question of what kind of country they want.

According to polls, Americans strongly agree that immigrants without legal status should be deported if they have been convicted of a violent crime. But support for Mr. Trump’s immigration sweeps begins to erode when people are asked about the much larger group of undocumented immigrants with no police record who have worked and raised families in the United States.

The arrest of Mr. Barranco, a Latino man doing a job that many other Latinos in California do, quickly became a rallying point for those who believe enforcement actions have gone too far. A slight man with a reserved demeanor, Mr. Barranco had built a life in the shadows, tending the lawns and flower beds of Southern California’s suburban homes and commercial properties. He had no criminal record.

All three of his sons are United States citizens, having been born in California. Alejandro, 25, was a combat engineer who deployed to Afghanistan to assist with the U.S. withdrawal. Jose Luis, 23, was released from military duty last month and plans to study nursing. Emanuel, 21, is still in the Marines, based in San Diego. The sons could have sponsored him for a green card but were discouraged by the time it would take and the thousands of dollars it would cost.

Ms. Hernandez, Mr. Barranco’s wife and the stepmother of the three young men, is also an American citizen.

Walter Salaverria, the IHOP operations director who hired Mr. Barranco, described him as “humble, hardworking, not just about the money.”

He added, “If I had 50 restaurants, I would give them to him.”

For years, many Americans have relied on immigrants to do the jobs they avoided — cleaning, building, picking fruits and vegetables, manicuring lawns and gardens. Under previous Republican and Democratic administrations, undocumented people who worked hard and stayed out of trouble could largely expect to be left alone.

Now that masked federal agents are pepper spraying these people and tackling them in the streets, some Americans are thinking of them differently — or perhaps thinking of them for the first time.

After the agents subdued Mr. Barranco, they shoved him, hands shackled behind his back, into an unmarked vehicle. He was soon transferred to a van with another immigrant who said he had been snatched as he left the Home Depot.

Mr. Barranco said an agent flung water on his bloody face and head. He said he pleaded with the agent to tie his hands in front of him because his shoulder hurt. “I was crying,” he recalled. “I said, ‘I won’t run. Just tie my hands in front; I can’t stand the pain.’”

By nightfall, he was crammed into a constantly lit basement in downtown Los Angeles with 70 other men. The air was thick with stench and despair. There was one exposed toilet. Some men slept standing, he said.

Mr. Barranco left a tearful voice mail message for Alejandro, informing him that he had been arrested and didn’t know where he was being held. His wallet and cellphone were still inside his truck outside the IHOP. Could someone retrieve them?

Two days later, after locating his father, Alejandro drove to Los Angeles and waited nearly four hours to see him, only to be turned away, like dozens of others, when visitation hours ended.

When Alejandro finally laid eyes on his father the next day, Mr. Barranco was disheveled and dirty, still in the same long-sleeve shirt and jeans he was wearing when he was arrested. Father and son met across a glass partition.

“My father looked defeated,” recalled Alejandro, who kept his composure as he tried to assure his father that the family was “taking care of everything.”

Sergio Perez, executive director of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, had agreed to escort Alejandro and was allowed to meet Mr. Barranco without a barrier. Mr. Perez asked Mr. Barranco if he could hug him since his son could not.

“No,” replied Mr. Barranco. “I smell so badly. I haven’t been able to shower.” The lawyer embraced him anyway. Mr. Barranco wept.

The next day, Mr. Barranco was transferred to a privately run detention center in the high desert, about two hours away.

Mr. Barranco was born in a village in Mexico, one of five children of campesinos who subsisted on the maize, beans, squash and tomatoes that they grew.

In 1994, he trekked through the desert to the border and sneaked undetected into Arizona. He made his way to California and began taking whatever work there was, in construction, restaurants, landscaping.

“I planned to save and return to Mexico,” Mr. Barranco said.

He married, and three boys came along, the first in 1999.

“I decided that if I took my kids to Mexico, they’d end up like me,” he said. “I thought, Here, I can work and ensure they have a better life.”

By 2002, Mr. Barranco had landed a job with a large landscaping company that offered benefits like health insurance. He began filing taxes.

The company trained him to properly prune trees, among other skills, and he became certified as an irrigation technician working on sprinkler systems. He was sometimes dispatched to Disneyland late at night to trim hedges. He later struck out on his own and built his client roster.

As his boys moved through elementary and middle school, Mr. Barranco, who only has a few years of formal education, took parenting workshops to support their success. In 2012, he received a Certificate of Congressional Recognition for his “faithful commitment and hard work” on behalf of his children’s education. That same year, after completing a nine-week “parental involvement program,” he earned a certificate guaranteeing that his sons would be admitted to any California state college after high school.

“Any opportunity to do something good to help them, I tried to take advantage,” he said.

Mr. Barranco and his first wife divorced in 2015. A few years later, he met Ms. Hernandez, then 58, at a Public Storage facility in Santa Ana where he kept some of his tools. He helped her haul a bed that she had kept there, and he gave her his number. Two weeks later, he helped her move more furniture and then called to check in on her. A friendship flourished.

“I was lonely, he was lonely,” said Ms. Hernandez, a widow whose children were grown. “We enjoyed each other’s company.”

On Mother’s Day in 2021, he joined her family for brunch. Mr. Barranco’s shrimp ceviche was a hit with her two sons and her parents. So was he.

“He was quiet at first,” her oldest son, Rigo Hernandez, now 40, recalled, “but there was a warmth about him that spoke louder than words.”

On Feb. 18, 2023, with the Pacific Ocean as their backdrop, they were married in a small ceremony officiated by Mr. Hernandez.

By then, all three of Mr. Barranco’s sons were in the Marine Corps.

“My father brought us up to respect this country and to appreciate the opportunities we would have,” Alejandro said.

Footage taken by bystanders of Mr. Barranco’s arrest went viral. The videos show several agents standing above him while others hold him down. One agent, kneeling at his side, strikes Mr. Barranco repeatedly in the head, neck and left shoulder as he groans. The agents force him into an S.U.V. with the aid of a metal rod.

The Department of Homeland Security posted a seven-second video of Mr. Barranco wielding the weed trimmer as agents pepper sprayed him. “Perhaps the mainstream media would like our officers to stand there and be mowed down instead of defending themselves?” Tricia McLaughlin, a department spokeswoman, wrote on X. The agency did not respond to a request for any additional comment beyond the post on X.

When Alejandro saw the videos, he flung his cellphone in anger.

The family gathered to make a plan. Alejandro, the only son released from active duty at the time, would take the lead in speaking out. Mr. Hernandez, Ms. Hernandez’s son, would contact federal and state lawmakers.

The family started a GoFundMe to raise money for a lawyer. The page featured photographs of the Barranco boys in uniform. In one image, Mr. Barranco is at a memorial service to fallen soldiers.

Alejandro began fielding news media requests. He tried to be measured in his comments. He said his father was a productive member of the community who hadn’t hurt anyone. The use of force by agents was excessive, unjustified and unprofessional, he said.

He said he felt betrayed by the country that he and his brothers loved and were willing to die for.

“There are many people in the military with immigrant parents like my dad,” Jose Luis said. “I never thought this could happen to him.”

The brothers expressed regret that they hadn’t managed to sponsor their father for a green card, which they were eligible to do as Americans and as servicemen.

“We saw a lawyer who wanted $5,000 just to start the process,” Alejandro recalled. He added, “Everyone was so busy in the military.”

Mr. Barranco recalls being transported to the immigration detention center in Adelanto, Calif., with an Asian man, an African man and a fellow Latino. They arrived at the lockup, which can hold nearly 2,000 immigrants, before sunrise and waited all day to be processed.

In a barrackslike pod, he was assigned to I-33 “low,” the bottom bed of a metal-framed bunk. He received three blue shirts, two pairs of pants and one pair of underwear. His neighbor, in bunk I-32 low, eventually gave him an extra pair.

He counted 172 men in the room.

“I befriended several people,” Mr. Barranco said, producing a list with the names and cellphone numbers of eight detainees.

Mr. Barranco’s family deposited money into his account so he could make phone calls and buy items like chips, coffee and instant noodles to supplement the unappetizing institutional food, he said.

He shared both his phone and his commissary credit with detainees whose families did not know their whereabouts or who could not afford the expensive calls and items. One was an Iranian man whose wife was about to give birth.

One day, Mr. Barranco bought 10 packets of noodle soup mix and distributed them. Someone handed him a pencil. It gave him an outlet for his anguish, he said.

He began to scrawl on scraps of paper he found. Prayers. Feelings. Names.

Mr. Barranco had no idea that his arrest had prompted protests and galvanized volunteers across Orange County.

Strangers delivered food, flowers and messages of support to his home.

Six days after his arrest, the Orange County Rapid Response Network, in coordination with his family, held a candlelight vigil and a peaceful march to honor Mr. Barranco and denounce indiscriminate immigration sweeps. Thousands of dollars flowed into the GoFundMe, enough to hire Lisa Ramirez, an immigration lawyer, to seek Mr. Barranco’s release, fight his deportation case and help him gain legal status in the United States.

Given that he is a father to a veteran, “Narciso could have been an American citizen by now,” Ms. Ramirez said.

Ms. Ramirez submitted a request to the government for “parole in place,” a program that allows undocumented parents of U.S. military members to remain lawfully in the country and work while they await approval for permanent residency.

Mr. Barranco’s wife, Ms. Hernandez, a U.S. citizen, offered another path, but one that would have required him to return to Mexico to complete the process. He would be separated from his family, likely for years, with no assurance he would be allowed to return.

Ms. Ramirez filed a motion for a bond hearing in immigration court. It included the birth certificates of his sons and proof of their military service, as well as the accolades from the school district and Congress for his parental involvement and other evidence of his good moral character.

Mr. Barranco had his hearing after 19 days in lockup. The government asked the judge to hold him without bond, as is common. Ms. Ramirez asked the judge to release him on the minimum bond of $1,500, arguing that he had three U.S.-born military sons and was not a flight risk.

The prosecutor requested a $13,000 bond. The judge set it at $3,000.

After his release five days later, Mr. Barranco stopped at an In-N-Out for a cheeseburger combo and vanilla shake.

Mr. Barranco made public remarks a few days after that at a news conference in downtown Santa Ana.

“To the community, I don’t have the words to truly express what I feel in my heart,” he said in Spanish, choking up. “So I can just say thank you for standing with my family and my children, for being by their side.” He also shared a message of hope for families of detainees.

Since his release, Mr. Barranco has mostly stayed home, venturing out on Sundays for church. Alejandro and Jose Luis, two of his sons, are covering his jobs.

He is alone while Ms. Hernandez is at work much of the day. His companions are Revoltosa, a cockatoo who has a predilection for perching on his right shoulder, and Snoopy, his small, fluffy white dog.

“They relieve my stress,” he said.

At 8 a.m. each day, he logs into a two-hour online English class. The ankle monitor he was fitted with before leaving Adelanto has since been removed. But three times a week, he must check in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

At 11:10 a.m. on a recent Thursday, during an interview for this article, his phone buzzed. His expression tensed as he entered a code and took a selfie, part of the monitoring protocol. Agents have also shown up at his door without notice.

He spends time in the garden, caring for his heirloom tomatoes, squash, peppers and cucumbers. A guava tree has recently taken root. He also tends the geraniums, jasmine and day lilies. In the kitchen, he puts his culinary talents to work preparing carne asada, ceviche and other dishes.

Mr. Barranco has also been keeping a journal. During an interview, he opened to the first page and read aloud. “At 4 a.m. on a Saturday, the routine of a poor gardener began. Then … ” His voice faltered and his face crumpled.

He tried to continue.

“Something happened that never could have been expected,” he said and then slammed the journal shut. “I can’t,” he said.

As of Tuesday, his lawyer had yet to receive acknowledgment from the government that his application for parole in place was under review.

He Raised Three Marines. His Wife Is American. The U.S. Wants to Deport Him.
After three decades in California, Narciso Barranco was arrested by agents while weeding outside an IHOP, stirring outrage and a fight to stop his deportation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/us/narciso-barranco-ice-deport-marines-trump.html

USA Today: Federal judge hands press groups wins in lawsuits against LAPD, DHS

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  • U.S. District Judge Hernan D. Vera issued preliminary injunctions in lawsuits against the Los Angeles Police Department and the Department of Homeland Security over officers’ treatment of journalists.
  • Vera wrote that federal officers “indiscriminate use of force … will undoubtedly chill the media’s efforts” to cover protests and that the police department violated both state and federal law.
  • Press groups filed lawsuits against both agencies in June following protests over President Donald Trump’s immigration raids in Los Angeles.

A federal judge handed press and civil liberties groups wins in two separate cases against the Los Angeles Police Department and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem over the treatment of journalists covering immigration raid protests.  

U.S. District Judge Hernan D. Vera’s preliminary injunctions bar, among other actions, the police department from arresting journalists for failing to disperse or otherwise interfering with journalists’ ability to cover Los Angeles protests. The DHS officers are also barred from “dispersing, threatening, or assaulting” journalists who haven’t “committed a crime unrelated to failing to obey a dispersal order.”

In his Sept. 10 order in the LAPD case, Vera wrote that the department’s “heavy-handed efforts to police this summer’s protests” violated both state and federal law.  

In granting the motion in the DHS case, Vera said federal officers “unleashed crowd control weapons indiscriminately and with surprising savagery” during the protests. 

“Specifically, the Court concludes that federal agents’ indiscriminate use of force … will undoubtedly chill the media’s efforts to cover these public events and protestors seeking to express peacefully their views on national policies,” Vera wrote.  

He went on to condemn individuals who engaged in violent action during such protests, but said “the actions of a relative few does not give DHS carte blanche to unleash near-lethal force on crowds of third parties in the vicinity.”  

In taking such actions, Vera wrote, federal officers have “endangered” peaceful protesters, journalists and the broader public. 

“The First Amendment demands better,” he wrote.  

USA TODAY reached out to the police department and the DHS for comment.  

“There’s an old line in policing: We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way,” Adam Rose, press rights chair of the Los Angeles Press Club, said in a news release following the rulings. “Press organizations have been trying to help LAPD for years take the easy way, just asking them to train officers and discipline offenders. They wouldn’t stop resisting. LAPD failed to police themselves. Now a judge is doing it for them.” 

The First Amendment Coalition filed the federal lawsuit against the police department in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California on behalf of the press club and the independent media outlet Status Coup in mid-June.  

Days later, a similar lawsuit was filed against Noem over what the plaintiffs, which include the Los Angeles Press Club and the NewsGuild-Communications Workers of America, described as federal officers’ unconstitutional actions against journalists.

Vera issued a temporary restraining order in the LAPD case on July 10 that barred officers from using less-lethal munitions against journalists not posing a threat to law enforcement. The plaintiffs later accused the department of violating the order by hitting journalists with batons and arresting them during an August protest.  

Federal judge hands press groups wins in lawsuits against LAPD, DHS
In granting the motion in the DHS case, the judge said federal officers’ actions will “undoubtedly chill the media’s efforts” to cover protests.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/09/15/lapd-dhs-la-press-club-court-wins/86112156007

Associated Press: She was adopted into an abusive home in the US. Decades later, ICE deported her back to Brazil

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In March, Pires showed up at the immigration office with paperwork listing all her check-ins over the past eight years. This time, instead of receiving another compliance report, she was immediately handcuffed and detained.

“The government failed her,” attorney Jim Merklinger said. “They allowed this to happen.”

It sounded like freedom, like a world of possibility beyond the orphanage walls.

Maria Pires was getting adopted. At 11 years old, she saw herself escaping the chaos and violence of the Sao Paulo orphanage, where she’d been sexually assaulted by a staff member. She saw herself leaving Brazil for America, trading abandonment for belonging.

A single man in his 40s, Floyd Sykes III, came to Sao Paulo to meet her. He signed some paperwork and brought Maria home.

She arrived in the suburbs of Baltimore in the summer of 1989, a little girl with a tousle of dark hair, a nervous smile and barely a dozen words of English. The sprawling subdivision looked idyllic, with rows of modest brick townhouses and a yard where she could play soccer.

She was, she believed, officially an American.

But what happened in that house would come to haunt her, marking the start of a long descent into violence, crime and mental illness.

“My father — my adopted father — he was supposed to save me,” Pires said. Instead, he tortured and sexually abused her.

After nearly three years of abuse, Sykes was arrested. The state placed Pires in foster care.

By then, she was consumed with fury. In the worst years, she beat a teenager at a roller rink, leaving him in a coma. She attacked a prison guard and stabbed her cellmate with a sharpened toothbrush.

In prison, she discovered that no one had ever bothered to complete her immigration paperwork. Not Sykes. Not Maryland social service agencies.

That oversight would leave her without a country. She wasn’t American, it turned out, and she’d lost her Brazilian citizenship when she was adopted by Sykes, who died several years ago. But immigration officials, including those under President Donald Trump’s first administration, let her stay in the country.

After her release from prison in 2017, Pires stayed out of trouble and sought help to control her anger. She checked in once a year with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and paid for an annual work permit.

But in the second Trump administration — with its promise of mass deportations, a slew of executive orders and a crackdown targeting those the president deemed “the worst of the worst” — everything changed. Trump’s unyielding approach to immigration enforcement has swept up tens of thousands of immigrants, including many like Pires who came to the U.S. as children and know little, if any, life outside America. They have been apprehended during ICE raids, on college campuses, or elsewhere in their communities, and their detentions often draw the loudest backlash.

In Pires’ case, she was detained during a routine check-in, sent to one immigration jail after another, and ultimately deported to a land she barely remembers. The Associated Press conducted hours of interviews with Pires and people who know her and reviewed Maryland court records, internal ICE communications, and adoption and immigration paperwork to tell her story.

U.S. immigration officials say Pires is a dangerous serial criminal who’s no longer welcome in the country. Her case, they say, is cut and dried.

Pires, now 47, doesn’t deny her criminal past.

But little about her story is straightforward.

A new chapter of childhood, marked by abuse

Pires has no clear memories from before she entered the orphanage. All she knows is that her mother spent time in a mental institution.

The organization that facilitated her adoption was later investigated by Brazilian authorities over allegations it charged exorbitant fees and used videos to market available children, according to a Sao Paulo newspaper. Organization leaders denied wrongdoing.

Pires remembers a crew filming a TV commercial. She believes that’s how Sykes found her.

In his custody, the abuse escalated over time. When Sykes went to work, he sometimes left her locked in a room, chained to a radiator with only a bucket as a toilet. He gave her beer and overpowered her when she fought back. She started cutting herself.

Sykes ordered her to keep quiet, but she spoke almost no English then anyway. On one occasion, he forced a battery into her ear as punishment, causing permanent hearing loss.

In September 1992, someone alerted authorities. Sykes was arrested. Child welfare officials took custody of Maria, then 14.

Maryland Department of Human Services spokesperson Lilly Price said the agency couldn’t comment on specific cases because of confidentiality laws but noted in a statement that adoptive parents are responsible for applying for U.S. citizenship for children adopted from other countries.

Court documents show Sykes admitted sexually assaulting Maria multiple times but he claimed the assaults stopped in June 1990.

He was later convicted of child abuse. Though he had no prior criminal record, court officials acknowledged a history of similar behavior, records show.

Between credit for time served and a suspended prison sentence, Sykes spent about two months in jail.

Sykes’ younger sister Leslie Parrish said she’s often wondered what happened to Maria.

“He ruined her life,” she said, weeping. “There’s a special place in hell for people like that.”

Parrish said she wanted to believe her brother had good intentions; he seemed committed to becoming a father and joined a social group for adoptive parents of foreign kids. She even accompanied him to Brazil.

But in hindsight, she sees it differently. She believes sinister motives lurked “in the back of his sick mind.”

At family gatherings, Maria didn’t show obvious signs of distress, though the language barrier made communication difficult. Other behavior was explained away as the result of her troubled childhood in the orphanage, Parrish said.

“But behind closed doors, I don’t know what happened.”

Years in prison and an eventual release

Pires’ teenage years were hard. She drank too much and got kicked out of school for fighting. She ran away from foster homes, including places where people cared for her deeply.

“If ever there was a child who was cheated out of life, it was Maria,” one foster mother wrote in later court filings. “She is a beautiful person, but she has had a hard life for someone so young.”

She struggled to provide for herself, sometimes ending up homeless. “My trauma was real bad,” she said. “I was on my own.”

At 18, she pleaded guilty to aggravated assault for the roller rink attack. She served two years in prison, where she finally learned basic reading and writing skills. It was then that authorities — and Pires herself — discovered she wasn’t a U.S. citizen.

Her criminal record meant it would be extremely difficult to gain citizenship. Suddenly, she faced deportation.

Pires said she hadn’t realized the potential consequences when accepting her plea deal.

“If l had any idea that I could be deported because of this, I would not have agreed to it,” she wrote, according to court records. “Going to jail was one thing, but I will lose everything if I am deported back to Brazil.”

A team of volunteer lawyers and advocates argued she shouldn’t be punished for something beyond her control.

“Maria has absolutely no one and nothing in Brazil. She would be completely lost there,” an attorney wrote in a 1999 letter to immigration officials.

Ultimately, the American judicial system agreed: Pires would be allowed to remain in the United States if she checked in annually with ICE, a fairly common process until Trump’s second term.

“How’s your mental?”

Pires didn’t immediately take advantage of her second chance.

She was arrested for cocaine distribution in 2004 and for check fraud in 2007. While incarcerated, she picked up charges for stabbing her cellmate in the eye, burning an inmate with a flat iron and throwing hot water on a correctional officer. Her sentence was extended.

Pires said she spent several years in solitary confinement, exacerbating her mental health challenges.

Her release in 2017 marked a new beginning. Through therapy and other support services, she learned to manage her anger and stay out of trouble. She gave up drinking. She started working long days in construction. She checked in every year with immigration agents.

But in 2023, work dried up and she fell behind on rent. She felt her mental health slipping. She applied for a women’s transitional housing program in Baltimore.

Pires thrived there. With no high school diploma and only second-grade reading skills, she qualified for a state-run job training course to polish and refinish floors. Photos show her smiling broadly in a blue graduation gown.

Friends say Pires may have a tough exterior, but she’s known for thinking of others first. She often greets people with a cheerful question: “How’s your mental?” It’s her way of acknowledging that everyone carries some sort of burden.

“This is a person who just yearns for family,” said Britney Jones, Pires’ former roommate. “She handles things with so much forgiveness and grace.”

The two were living together when Pires went to downtown Baltimore on March 6 for her annual immigration check-in. She never returned.

A crackdown on “the worst of the worst”

When President Donald Trump campaigned for a second term, he doubled down on promises to carry out mass deportations. Within hours of taking office, he signed a series of executive orders, targeting what he called “the worst of the worst” — murderers, rapists, gang members. The goal, officials have said, is 1 million deportations a year.

In March, Pires showed up at the immigration office with paperwork listing all her check-ins over the past eight years. This time, instead of receiving another compliance report, she was immediately handcuffed and detained.

“The government failed her,” attorney Jim Merklinger said. “They allowed this to happen.”

Given that she was adopted into the country as a child, she shouldn’t be punished for something that was out of her hands from the start, he said.

Her March arrest sparked a journey across America’s immigration detention system. From Baltimore, she was sent to New Jersey and Louisiana before landing at Eloy Detention Center in Arizona.

She tried to stay positive. Although Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric made her nervous, Pires reminded herself that the system granted her leniency in the past. She told her friends back home not to worry.

A deportation priority

On June 2, in an email exchange obtained by AP, an ICE agent asked to have Pires prioritized for a deportation flight to Brazil leaving in four days.

“I would like to keep her as low profile as possible,” the agent wrote.

Her lawyer tried to stop the deportation, calling Maryland politicians, ICE officials and Brazilian diplomats.

“This is a woman who followed all the rules,” Merklinger said. “This should not be happening.”

He received terrified calls from Pires, who was suddenly transferred to a detention facility near Alexandria, Louisiana, a common waypoint for deportation flights.

Finally, Pires said, she was handcuffed, shackled, put on a bus with dozens of other detainees, driven to the Alexandria airport and loaded onto an airplane. There was a large group of Brazilians on the flight, which was a relief, though she spoke hardly any Portuguese after so many years in the U.S.

“I was just praying to God,” she said. “Maybe this is his plan.”

After two stops to drop off other deportees, they arrived in the Brazilian port city of Fortaleza.

Starting from scratch back in Brazil

Brazilian authorities later took Pires to a women’s shelter in an inland city in the eastern part of the country.

She has spent months there trying to get Brazilian identification documents. She began relearning Portuguese — listening to conversations around her and watching TV.

Most of her belongings are in a Baltimore storage unit, including DJ equipment and a tripod she used for recording videos — two of her passions.

In Brazil, she has almost nothing. She depends on the shelter for necessities such as soap and toothpaste. But she maintains a degree of hope.

“I’ve survived all these years,” Pires said. “I can survive again.”

She can’t stop thinking about her birth family. Years ago, she got a tattoo of her mother’s middle name. Now more than ever, she wants to know where she came from. “I still have that hole in my heart,” she said.

Above all, she hopes to return to America. Her attorney recently filed an application for citizenship. But federal officials say that’s not happening.

“She was an enforcement priority because of her serial criminal record,” Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in an email. “Criminals are not welcome in the U.S.”

Every morning, Pires wakes up and keeps trying to build a new life. She’s applied for Brazilian work authorization, but getting a job will probably be difficult until her Portuguese improves. She’s been researching language classes and using her limited vocabulary to communicate with other shelter residents.

In moments of optimism, she imagines herself working as a translator, earning a decent salary and renting a nice apartment.

She wonders if God’s plan will ever become clear.

She was adopted into an abusive home in the US. Decades later, ICE deported her back to Brazil
When Maria Pires was adopted from Brazil as a child, she believed she was officially an American. But her adoptive father, who sexually abused her for years, never completed paperwork to make her a citizen.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-immigration-policy-deportations-brazil-bb8beabbe4deb8f966826b9161158a3b

Daily Beast: ICE Karen Sparks Major Backlash After Saying She Tipped Off Feds in Hyundai Raid

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The MAGA candidate has been accused of undermining President Trump’s economic agenda and causing an international incident.

A MAGA congressional candidate is being trolled relentlessly online after announcing that she tipped off Immigration and Customs Enforcement about alleged workplace violations at a Hyundai plant in Georgia that was raided last week.

Tori Branum, 47, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and firearms instructor, said in social media posts and in interviews that she had reported the battery plant, which is under construction near Savannah, to ICE several months before officials conducted the largest work-site immigration raid in Department of Homeland Security history there.

About 475 people were detained, including 300 South Korean nationals.

The raid angered South Korea, a close ally that agreed in July to invest $350 billion in the U.S. in exchange for Trump lowering the duty on Korean products from 25 percent to 15 percent. The tariffs are paid by American companies, with the costs typically passed on to consumers.

“I have gotten hate mail from all over the country with people telling me to die or that I should be in fear,” Branum wrote on Facebook. “I served this country and I’ll go down with the ship before someone silences me.”

Over the past few days, she’s also been inundated with social media comments accusing her of undermining President Donald Trump’s economic agenda and creating a diplomatic scandal with one of the U.S’.’s closest allies.

The battery plant that was raided will be jointly operated by Hyundai and LG Energy Solution, a South Korean battery manufacturer, as part of a $12.6 billion investment in Georgia that also includes a nearby auto factory.

“So MAGA wanted tariffs to bring manufacturing back to the US. But when a company tries to open a plant here, MAGA undermines it. Once again you proved what an embarrassment your party is to our country,” a user wrote under one of Branum’s Instagram posts.

The Hyundai plant arrests came just 10 days after South Korea’s new president, Lee Jae Myung, met Trump in Washington, D.C., where they both vowed to strengthen business ties between the two countries.

“Imagine backing Trump’s ‘bring jobs back’ tariffs then cheering the ICE raid that nuked Georgia’s $4.3B Hyundai plant—475 workers arrested, 40k jobs gone. That’s not America First, that’s economic suicide. You’re a walking contradiction and a clown,” wrote another under a different post by Branum.

“You have caused a serious geopolitical problem between us and S. Korea with your massively ignorant actions,” another user chimed in.

Residents in the Korean capital of Seoul were outraged by the operation’s optics, as footage of the raid showed armored vehicles and shackled workers. In a statement, Hyundai told the Wall Street Journal it didn’t directly employ anyone who was detained.

The South Korean government has negotiated the release of its nationals and is chartering a plane to repatriate them, Reuters reported Monday.

The local press has attacked Branum and accused her of using the raid to generate momentum for her political campaign in Georgia’s 12th district, The Washington Post reported.

“Her justification of ‘protecting American jobs’ rings hollow when her actions sabotage Georgia’s long-term prosperity,” wrote a South Korean business publication called CEO News.

Many users on social media said they hoped the ICE raid would hurt her campaign instead of helping it.

“You literally helped kill the economy in your own area, but you want to be a leader?” a user responded to a third post.

The Daily Beast has reached out to Branum, ICE, DHS, and Hyundai for comment.

Branum has remained defiant throughout it all, telling Rolling Stone in an interview, “This is what I voted for — to get rid of a lot of illegals. And what I voted for is happening.”

At one point, she posted a photo of herself on Facebook holding a modified, AR-15-style rifle with a laser scope, the Korea JoonAng Daily reported.

“I’m kinda curious what that was [that] you said in my inbox,” Branum wrote.

She later took down the post, but still has a different shot of her brandishing an automatic weapon.

“Patriotism is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime,” she captioned the post, attributing the quote to Benjamin Franklin.

In fact, it was Democratic governor and ambassador Adlai Stevenson II who said it.

ICE Karen Sparks Major Backlash After Saying She Tipped Off Feds in Hyundai Raid
The MAGA candidate has been accused of undermining President Trump’s economic agenda and causing an international incident.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/candidate-tori-branum-sparks-major-backlash-after-saying-she-tipped-off-feds-in-hyundai-raid

Another article:

‘I’ll go down with the ship!’ MAGA candidate not sorry for sparking international incident

https://www.rawstory.com/hyundai-2673975173

CNN: Kavanaugh faces blowback for claiming Americans can sue over encounters with ICE

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Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s breezy suggestion this week that Americans who are roughed up by ICE can sue agents in federal court is drawing pushback from civil rights attorneys who note the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has in recent years made those cases nearly impossible to win.

Writing to explain the court’s emergency ruling Monday that allowed the Trump administration to continue “roving” immigration patrols in Southern California, Kavanaugh brushed aside concerns that masked ICE agents had pushed, shoved and detained Hispanics – in one instance throwing a US citizen against a fence and confiscating his phone.

“To the extent that excessive force has been used,” Kavanaugh wrote in a 10-page concurrence, “the Fourth Amendment prohibits such action, and remedies should be available in federal court.”

But in a series of recent decisions – including two that involved incidents at the border – the Supreme Court has severely limited the ability of people to sue federal law enforcement officers for excessive force claims. Kavanaugh, who was nominated to the court by Trump during his first term, was in the majority in those decisions.

“It’s bordering on impossible to get any sort of remedy in a federal court when a federal officer violates federal rights,” said Patrick Jaicomo, a senior attorney at the libertarian Institute for Justice who has regularly represented clients suing federal agents.

Lauren Bonds, executive director of the National Police Accountability Project, said that it can be incredibly difficult for a person subjected to excessive force to find an attorney and take on the federal government in court.

“What we’ve seen is, term after term, the court limiting the avenues that people have available to sue the federal government,” Bonds told CNN.

Sotomayor dissents

To stop a person on the street for questioning, immigration officials must have a “reasonable suspicion” that the person is in the country illegally. The question for the Supreme Court was whether an agent could rely on factors like a person’s apparent ethnicity, language or their presence at a particular location, to establish reasonable suspicion.

A US district court in July ordered the Department of Homeland Security to discontinue the practice of making initial stops based on those factors. The Supreme Court on Monday, without an explanation from the majority, put that lower court order on hold – effectively greenlighting the administration’s approach while the litigation continues in lower courts.

In a sharp dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor cited the stories raised by several of the people in Southern California who had been caught up in the crackdown.

“The government, and now the concurrence, has all but declared that all Latinos, US citizens or not, who work low wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction,” wrote Sotomayor, joined by fellow liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Jason Gavidia, a US citizen, was approached in June by masked agents who repeatedly questioned his citizenship status, pressing him to name the hospital in which he was born, according to court records. When he could not answer that question, he said, agents racked a rifle, took his phone and pushed him up against a metal fence.

He was later released.

Another US citizen, Jorge Viramontes, was grabbed and escorted by agents into a vehicle and held in a “warehouse area” for further questioning, according to court documents.

Richard Re, a Harvard Law professor, viewed Kavanaugh’s remark in the opinion differently. Maybe, Re wrote on Tuesday, Kavanaugh was attempting to signal something about where he thinks the law should go.

“When you have an important sentence that’s very ambiguous, it’s usually deliberately so,” Re, who clerked for Kavanaugh when he was an appeals court judge, told CNN.

“I think it’s not clear what to make of that remark,” Re said. “It could suggest a genuine interest, on at least one pivotal justice’s part, in revitalizing Fourth Amendment remediation.”

Limited recourse

The court has for years been limiting the ability of people who face excessive force to sue federal agents, litigation that proponents say can act as a check on such behavior.

In 2020, the court’s conservative majority blocked a damages lawsuit from the family of a 15-year-old Mexican boy who was shot and killed across the border by a Border Patrol agent.

Three years ago, the court similarly rejected a suit from a US citizen who owned a bed and breakfast near the Canadian border and who said he was pushed to the ground as Border Patrol agents questioned a guest about their immigration status.

Lawsuits against federal police are controlled by a 1971 precedent, Bivens v.
Six Unknown Named Agents, that involved federal drug agents who searched the home of a man without a warrant. The Supreme Court allowed that lawsuit, but in recent years it has significantly clamped down on the ability of people to file suits in any other circumstance besides the warrant involved in the Bivens case. The right to sue federal agents, the court has maintained, should be set by Congress, not the courts.

Americans may also sue the government for damages under the Federal Tort Claims Act, if its employees engage in wrongdoing or negligence. But federal courts have carved out a complicated patchwork of exceptions to that law as well. Earlier this year, in a case involving an FBI raid on the wrong house, a unanimous Supreme Court allowed the family to sue, but also limited the scope of a provision of the law that was aimed at protecting people who are harmed by federal law enforcement.

The tort law, Bonds said, is “incredibly narrow, incredibly complex and definitely not a sure thing.”

‘Shadow docket’ criticism

Kavanaugh’s opinion came as the court has faced sharp criticism in some quarters for deciding a slew of emergency cases in Trump’s favor without any explanation.

The Supreme Court has consistently sided with Trump recently, overturning lower courts’ temporary orders and allowing the president to fire the leadership of independent agencies, cut spending authorized by Congress and pursue an aggressive crackdown on immigration while litigation continues in lower courts.

Those emergency cases don’t fully resolve the legal questions at hand – and the court is often hesitant to write opinions that could influence the final outcome of a case – but they can have enormous, real-world consequences.

Emergency cases are almost always handled without oral argument and are addressed on a much tighter deadline than the court’s regular merits cases.

In that sense, Kavanaugh’s opinion provided some clarity about how at least one member of the court’s majority viewed the ICE patrols.

He noted Sotomayor’s dissent and pointed out that the issue of excessive force was not involved in the case.

“The Fourth Amendment’s reasonableness standard continues to govern the officers’ use of force and to prohibit excessive force,” Kavanaugh said.

What he didn’t explain, several experts note, is how a violation of those rights could be vindicated.

“Sincerely wondering,” University of Chicago law professor William Baude posted on social media, “what remedies does Justice Kavanaugh believe are and should be available in federal court these days for excessive force violations by federal immigration officials?”

Kavanaugh faces blowback for claiming Americans can sue over encounters with ICE | CNN Politics
Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s breezy suggestion this week that Americans who are roughed up by ICE can sue agents in federal court is drawing pushback from civil rights attorneys who note the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has in recent years made those cases nearly impossible to win.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/10/politics/kavanaugh-blowback-ice

Fox News: ICE agents break car window to arrest resisting illegal immigrant in exclusive Fox News ride-along

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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago this week, arresting multiple criminal illegal immigrants as Fox News joined agents for an exclusive ride-along.

On Tuesday, ICE agents arrested a Mexican national on a federal criminal arrest warrant for multiple felony reentries into the United States. Fox News learned that the individual had been deported twice to Mexico and returned a third time to the U.S. He is also facing charges for assault in a previous case.

Fox News cameras followed agents as they approached the Mexican national outside his home. The individual tried to enter his car to avoid arrest, forcing ICE agents to break its window and extract him from the vehicle. He then appears to continue resisting arrest.

The Mexican national will face federal criminal prosecution before he is deported, potentially spending time in jail, Fox News learned.

ICE and Fox lie as usual — this guy’s only “crime” was being in the U.S. too often. We are not made the least bit safer by his arrest, and taxpayers will be funding his room and board.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ice-agents-break-car-window-to-arrest-resisting-illegal-immigrant-in-exclusive-fox-news-ride-along/ar-AA1McWfM

Washington Post: Senators ramp up pressure on Trump to abandon threats to send troops into U.S. cities

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A group of Democratic senators is filing a friend of the court brief Tuesday in California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s lawsuit against President Donald Trump, stepping up pressure to keep Trump from overriding Democratic leaders and sending National Guard troops into Democrat-led cities like Chicago.

The 19 senators are asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to overturn a temporary order issued by a three-judge panel in June that found that Trump had the authority to send National Guard troops into Los Angeles this summer over Newsom’s objections. The Democratic senators argue that the issue has gained greater salience since then, as Trump began threatening to go into other states and cities against the wishes of their governors and mayors.

The senators are amplifying Newsom’s argument that the president’s use of the federal troops — at a moment when local law enforcement officials said they did not need federal support — violated the separation of powers doctrine by usurping Congress.

A federal district court judge initially sided with Newsom on June 12. Then, on June 19, the three-judge panel issued their temporary ruling siding with Trump. California is waiting on a final ruling from the appeals court.

Led by California Democratic Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla, the group includes senators who represent Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, and Portland — all cities that Trump has threatened to send in National Guard troops to “straighten it out” as he ramps up enforcement on crime and immigration. Schiff said in a statement that he hoped the Newsom case would become “the line drawn in the sand to prevent further misuse of our service members on the streets of American cities.”

The senators argue in their brief that by federalizing 4,000 California National Guard troops for domestic law enforcement over Newsom’s objections “without showing a genuine inability to enforce federal laws with the regular forces,” Trump violated the Tenth Amendment’s anti-commandeering mandate and contravened the provisions of the Constitution assigning power over militias to Congress.

“Our concern that President Trump will continue to act in bad faith and abuse his power is borne out by his recent deployment of state militias to Washington, D.C. and his stated intent to deploy state militias elsewhere (like Chicago and Baltimore),” the senators wrote in the brief obtained by The Washington Post that will be filed in court Tuesday. They warned that courts are the last resort to “prevent the President from exceeding his constitutional powers” and that failing to do so could “usher in an era of unprecedented, dangerous executive power.”

In court filings this summer, the administration argued that Trump was compelled to send the National Guard to protect federal personnel and property because numerous “incidents of violence and disorder” posed unacceptable safety risks to personnel who were “supporting the faithful execution of federal immigration laws.” Department of Justice lawyers argued that Trump was within his rights to mobilize the National Guard and Marines “to protect federal agents and property from violent mobs that state and local authorities cannot or choose not to control.”

Before Trump sent National Guard troops into Los Angeles this summer in the midst of protests against his administration’s immigration raids, prior presidents had deployed Guard troops on American soil primarily to assist after natural disasters or to quell unrest.

The senators write that the last instance in which a president federalized the National Guard without consent from the state’s governor is when Alabama Gov. George Wallace (D) ordered the Alabama Highway Patrol to prevent the Rev. Martin Luther King, Rep. John Lewis and others from marching from Selma to Montgomery. President Lyndon B. Johnson intervened to protect the marchers.

Our arguments to the court make clear that Trump’s unprecedented militarization of Los Angeles should not be used as a playbook for terrorizing other cities across America,” Padilla said in a statement.

Last month, the president deployed National Guard troops and federal agents to D.C., arguing that they needed to tackle a “crime emergency” that local officials say does not exist. D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb, a Democrat, last week sued the Trump administration, seeking to force it to withdraw troops from the city.

In recent days, Trump has escalated his warnings to intervene in Chicago, posting on his social media site that the city is “about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” a reference to the Defense Department.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) said on social media Monday that Trump’s threats were not “about fighting crime,” which would require “support and coordination” from the administration that he had not yet seen.

The Department of Homeland Security announced Monday that it had launched an operation to target immigrants in Chicago as the president vowed a broader crackdown on violent crime. A spokesperson for Pritzker said Monday that the governor’s office has not received any formal communication from the Trump administration or information about its plans.

Senators ramp up pressure on Trump to abandon threats to send troops into U.S. cities
Democratic senators are filing a brief in support of California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s suit against the Trump administration.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/senators-ramp-up-pressure-on-trump-to-abandon-threats-to-send-troops-into-u-s-cities/ar-AA1Mb9dp

Salon: Sotomayor says SCOTUS ruling lets ICE “seize anyone who looks Latino”

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Sotomayor worried that the ruling made Latinos living in Los Angeles “fair game” for ICE harassment

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted the Supreme Court’s decision to allow wide-scale ICE raids and immigration stops in Los Angeles to continue on Monday. In a scathing dissent, she said the court was giving the Department of Homeland Security a green light to “seize anyone who looks Latino.”

The Monday ruling lifted an injunction on “roving” ICE actions in Southern California. That order from a lower court judge barred agents from carrying out detentions based on ethnicity, languages being spoken, employment or location.

While the Supreme Court’s ruling was unsigned, it appeared to be supported along partisan lines as all three liberals dissented. Writing for the liberal justices, Sotomayor called the order “unconscionable” and said it made Latinos throughout the region “fair game.”

“We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low-wage job,” Sotomayor wrote.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, concurring with the unnamed majority, said ethnicity was a  “a ‘relevant factor’” for ICE agents to consider. He added that  “many” undocumented immigrants in the Los Angeles area “do not speak much English,” and work low-wage, manual labor jobs.

“Under this Court’s precedents, not mention common sense, those circumstances taken together can constitute at least reasonable suspicion of illegal presence in the United States,” Kavanaugh wrote.

In her dissent, Sotomayor raised concerns about how the ruling could impact constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

“The Fourth Amendment protects every individual’s constitutional right to be free from arbitrary interference by law officers,” she wrote. “After today, that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little.”

Sotomayor says SCOTUS ruling lets ICE “seize anyone who looks Latino” – Salon.com
Sotomayor worried that the ruling made Latinos living in Los Angeles “fair game” for ICE harassment.

https://www.salon.com/2025/09/08/sotomayor-says-scotus-ruling-lets-ice-seize-anyone-who-looks-latino

Independent: Federal agents to ‘flood the zone’ after Supreme Court opens door for racial profiling in Los Angeles immigration raids

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The Trump administration is vowing to “FLOOD THE ZONE” after the Supreme Court opened the door for federal law enforcement officers to roam the streets of Los Angeles to make immigration arrests based on racially profiling suspects.

A 6-3 decision from the nation’s high court Monday overturned an injunction that blocked federal agents from carrying out sweeps in southern California after a judge determined they were indiscriminately targeting people based on race and whether they spoke Spanish, among other factors.

The court’s conservative majority did not provide a reason for the decision, which is typical for opinions on the court’s emergency docket.

In a concurring opinion, Trump-appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that “apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion” but it can be a “relevant factor” for immigration enforcement.

Attorney General Pam Bondi called the ruling a “massive victory” that allows Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to “continue carrying out roving patrols in California without judicial micromanagement.”

The Department of Homeland Security said its officers “will continue to FLOOD THE ZONE in Los Angeles” following the court’s order.

“This decision is a victory for the safety of Americans in California and for the rule of law,” the agency said in a statement accusing Democrat Mayor Karen Bass of “protecting” immigrants who have committed crimes.

Federal law enforcement “will not be slowed down and will continue to arrest and remove the murderers, rapists, gang members and other criminal illegal aliens that Karen Bass continues to give safe harbor,” according to Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin.

The court’s opinion drew a forceful rebuke from liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic justice on the bench, who accused the conservative justices of ignoring the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unlawful protects against unlawful searches and seizures

“We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job,” she wrote in a dissenting opinion.

“The Fourth Amendment protects every individual’s constitutional right to be “free from arbitrary interference by law officers,’” she added. “After today, that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little.”

Immigration raids throughout the Los Angeles area in June sparked massive protests demanding the Trump administration withdraw ICE and federal agents from patrolling immigrant communities.

In response, Trump federalized National Guard troops and sent in hundreds of Marines despite objections from Democratic city and state officials. The administration deployed roughly 5,000 National Guard soldiers and Marines to the Los Angeles area, assisting with more than 170 law enforcement operations carried out by federal agencies, according to the Department of Defense.

The Pentagon has ended most of those operations, but hundreds of National Guard members remain active in southern California.

California Governor Gavin Newsom sued the administration, alleging the president illegally deployed the troops in violation of a 140-year-old law that prohibits the military from performing domestic law enforcement operations.

ACLU legal director Cecillia Wang, representing groups who sued to block indiscriminate raids in Los Angeles, said the Supreme Court order “puts people at grave risk.”

The order allows federal agents “to target individuals because of their race, how they speak, the jobs they work, or just being at a bus stop or the car wash when ICE agents decide to raid a place,” she said.

“For anyone perceived as Latino by an ICE agent, this means living in a fearful ‘papers please’ regime, with risks of violent ICE arrests and detention,” Wang added.

In his lengthy concurring opinion, Kavanaugh suggested that the demographics of southern California and the estimated 2 million people without legal permission living in the state support ICE’s sweeping operations.

He also argued that because Latino immigrants without legal status “tend to gather in certain locations to seek daily work,” work in construction, and may not speak English, officers have a “reasonable suspicion” to believe they are violating immigration law.

Sotomayor criticized Kavanaugh’s assessment that ICE was merely performing “brief stops for questioning.”

“Countless people in the Los Angeles area have been grabbed, thrown to the ground and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor,” she wrote. “Today, the court needlessly subjects countless more to these exact same indignities.”

Because the court did not provide a reasoning behind the ruling, it is difficult to discern whether the justices intend for the order to have wider effect, giving Donald Trump a powerful tool to execute his commands for millions of arrests for his mass deportation agenda.

Bass warned that the ruling could have sweeping consequences.

“I want the entire nation to hear me when I say this isn’t just an attack on the people of Los Angeles, this is an attack on every person in every city in this country,” she said in a statement.

Feds to ‘flood the zone’ after Supreme Court allows roving ICE raids
Trump administration promises ‘roving patrols’ after conservative justices allow ICE to target Latinos and Spanish speakers

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/supreme-court-ice-immigration-raids-racial-profiling-b2822602.html

Reuters: Trump administration says it launched ‘Operation Midway Blitz’ in Chicago

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  • DHS says operation targets ‘criminal illegal aliens’ in Chicago
  • Illinois governor say no advance notice or coordination provided
  • Critics decry ‘Operation Midway Blitz’ as political theater
  • Local officials say ICE sweep terrorizes Latino communities

After weeks of vowing to deploy National Guard troops to fight crime in Chicago, the Trump administration said on Monday it had launched a deportation crackdown in Illinois targeting hardened criminals among immigrants in the U.S. without legal status.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in an online statement that “Operation Midway Blitz” was being conducted by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, but details about its scope and nature were not immediately made clear.

It remained to be seen whether President Donald Trump would send National Guard soldiers into Chicago to accompany ICE and other federal law enforcement officers, as he has in and around Los Angeles and the District of Columbia.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, both Democrats, each said their offices had received no official notice from federal authorities about the operation, which they decried as a political stunt designed to intimidate.

Trump has been ramping up his rhetoric about expanding federal law enforcement and National Guard presence in Democratic-led cities and states, casting the use of presidential power as an urgent effort to confront crime even as local officials cite declines in homicides and other violent offenses.

DHS said its latest ICE operation was necessary because of city and state “sanctuary” laws that limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the crackdown was aimed at convicted gang members, rapists, kidnappers and drug traffickers who she called “the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens in Chicago.”

The press release cited 11 cases of immigrants in the U.S. illegally, most from Mexico and Venezuela, who DHS said had records of arrest or convictions for serious crimes and were released from local jails rather than turned over to federal immigration officials.

City Alderwoman Jeylu Gutierrez, who represents the predominantly Hispanic 14th Ward on Chicago’s southwest side, said at least five members of her community had been detained in what she called a “federal assault.”

Among those arrested, Gutierrez said, was a flower vendor taken into custody on the job, while others were detained as they waited for a bus or walked on the sidewalk.

‘THIS ISN’T ABOUT FIGHTING CRIME’

“This was never about arresting the worst of the worst, this is about terrorizing our communities,” Gutierrez, a Mexican immigrant, told a press conference.

Pritzker, widely seen as a potential 2028 candidate for the White House, also disputed the crime-fighting rationale that Trump voiced last Tuesday when he said he would send National Guard troops to Chicago, the nation’s third most populous city and a Democratic stronghold.

“This isn’t about fighting crime,” Pritzker said on social media platform X on Monday. “That requires support and coordination — yet we’ve experienced nothing like that over the past several weeks.”

Pritzker has suggested Trump’s National Guard deployments might be a dress rehearsal for using the military to manipulate the 2026 midterm congressional elections.

Johnson said he was concerned about “potential militarized immigration enforcement without due process,” citing “ICE’s track record of detaining and deporting American citizens and violating the human rights of hundreds of detainees.”

In a post on Truth Social on Monday, Trump cited recent murders and shootings in Chicago and blamed Pritzker for making no requests for assistance from the Trump administration.

“I want to help the people of Chicago, not hurt them,” Trump wrote. “Only the Criminals will be hurt! We can move fast and stop this madness.”

In a separate post on Saturday, Trump posted a meme based on the 1979 Vietnam War movie “Apocalypse Now” that showed an image of the Chicago skyline with flames and helicopters, reminiscent of the deadly helicopter attack on a Vietnamese village in the film.

The Trump administration launched a parallel immigration enforcement operation in Boston in recent days, an ICE official confirmed on Monday.

ICE also said on Monday that its Houston-based agents had arrested 822 “criminal aliens, transnational gang members, child predators, foreign fugitives and other egregious offenders” during a week-long operation last month in southeastern Texas.

Previously, DHS said ICE had arrested nearly 1,500 immigration offenders during a month-long enforcement surge in Massachusetts in May and early June.

The latest ICE operation in Chicago was announced the same day that the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 6-3 decision allowing federal agents in Southern California to proceed with immigration raids that detain people on the basis of their race, ethnicity, language or accent, even without “reasonable suspicion” that they are in the country illegally.

Trump administration says it launches ICE crackdown in Illinois
After weeks of vowing to deploy National Guard troops to fight crime in Chicago, the Trump administration said on Monday it had launched a deportation crackdown in Illinois targeting hardened criminals among immigrants in the U.S. without legal status.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-says-it-launches-ice-crackdown-illinois-2025-09-08